Stainless steel or other material tubes are used in endoscopic surgery or procedures by insertion of the tubes into a patient's body, such as into body cavities, canals or passages in the body, or transdermally into body cavities, tissues or organs. Instruments are inserted through such tubes, e.g. for observation or inspection, for carrying out medical procedures at the open end of the tube inserted into the patient's body, and/or for insertion, location and placement of articles into the patient's body. Obviously such tubes must be thoroughly cleaned and sterilised before re-use. There are no particular problems with external cleaning of the tubes but internal cleaning is presently carried out using simple bristle tube cleaners. These bristle cleaners each comprise essentially a wire central body which is inserted into the tube, the wire having flexible bristles projecting radially along part of the length of the wire body so that the person cleaning the tool simply scrubs back and forth while periodically flushing the tube with a sanitising or sterilising solvent or solution. The bristles each contact the internal walls with effectively a point contact so that prolonged scrubbing is necessary to ensure reasonable probability that all surfaces have been effectively cleaned. However time pressure on the person cleaning the tube can induce shortening of the scrubbing time. Also, even prolonged scrubbing still leaves some statistical risk that parts of the internal surface have not been contacted by the bristles.
A tube cleaner for hygienic internal cleaning of tubes may also find application in other areas such as in cleaning of tubes used for conveying food and beverage products, pharmaceutical products or ingredients or carriers for pharmaceutical products, natural or herbal products or ingredients or carriers therefor, and possibly in the chemical industries.